I was reading the Wikipedia article about American rock singer Suzi Quatro. Concerning her family background, it says:
There are countless similar family stories about immigrant ancestors who (allegedly) had their family names changed at random and presumably against their will by immigration officials once they arrived at Ellis Island because the government agent could not or would not spell/pronounce the foreign sounding name of the new immigrant correctly. This almost seems to be a part of American folklore.
I would consider this a very rude thing to do, maybe even outright illegal. I remember reading an article about the subject which stated that the name changes didn’t really happen like this and that usually, it was the immigrant himself who chose to change his name because he was about to start a new life and assuming a more generic name (to English speaking ears) made sense.
In my family we didn’t have surnames in the old country being serfs/peasants/etc., only the nobility had family names. When the family came over around 1900 they were assigned surnames by the immigration guys. Since the family groups came over in three batches that meant full-blood siblings wound up with three different surnames between them. Once they figured out what that extra word on their papers was they actually sat down and voted on which of them they liked better and they all got it changed to the same surname.
Or so goes the family legend. I don’t really doubt the generalities, even if the details may have been, shall we say, enhanced for story effect. We really didn’t have surnames in the old country. When they came over they didn’t speak English (several other languages, but not English) and wouldn’t have understood a request for their surname, and if they had, would have said they didn’t have one. I’ve heard this story from others as well.
America - what a great country! They give you a second name like you’re nobility or something!
You have to remember that what counted as rude for prior generations sometimes differed from what we consider rude. I don’t see where the practice would have been illegal.
No, that’s simply incorrect, or perhaps inaccurate is a better word. Could some families have ended up with their current last name because an immigrant thought the spelling on the immigration form (which was different because the travel papers were illegible, or because the form was filled in based on what the clerk thought he heard the immigrant say, or some other reason) was their new official name? Sure. Perhaps that ended up being the only identification paper they had, at least that people where they ended up could read?
But in general the forms were a) filled in based on travel papers from the country of origin and b) people changed their names for months and years after immigration, and I don’t mean just variations in spelling.
My great-great-great uncle, the ancestor of most of my Canadian relatives, is registered as Nils Gulbrandsen Hvalsei Tuftin when leaving Norway. Baptism name, patronymic, place of residence, surname, but not firmly established.
He then shows up in US records first as Nels Gilbertson, then as Nels Knutson when he’s living with his father, who in that census is recorded with his patronymic, and then as Nels Tuftin. If any of those were assigned at the boarder it obviously wasn’t a big problem to change them around.
The three surnames for my grandparents’ generation were NOT spelling variations. As examples (not the real names) think Silverman, Stein, and Rosenson. They were that different. Keep in mind as well my ancestors did NOT have surnames. At all. They didn’t come from Western Europe. Nor was it a matter of literacy as they were quite capable of reading and writing in several languages and two different alphabets, just not English or the Latin alphabet at the time.
Apparently you’re unaware of the great number of people who arrived without “papers”? My relatives were refugees, they had no “papers”. They arrived W.O.P. or “without passport”.
Allegedly, it went something like this:
Immigration, in English: “What is your name?”
My relatives, in a different language: “What did you just say?”
Immigration, “OK, you’re Rosenson”
As I said, I expect the real details were slightly different, but there’s no question we didn’t acquire surnames until we came here, and the last names assigned were those associated with Sephardic Jews, not Ashkenazi which is what they actually were. They maintained until their dying day that immigration assigned them surnames, it wasn’t a matter of translating a name or even the immigrants picking one.
The simple answer is that immigration officials did not have anything to do with it. All names were taken from passenger lists from the ship’s official manifest. Immigration just copied what they were given.
Now the manifests may have had mistakes, and in some cases the immigrants gave a name they thought sounded more “American” (though often the new name was chosen after they had been in the US a little while (how else would they know what an “American”; name sounded like?")), but the immigration authorities never made arbitrary changes (other than typoes).
My husband’s family name is unique, and I’d only found one other family in the entire US with that last name. There were similar ones, but nothing exactly the same.
We went to Ellis Island several years ago, and I paid to go into the research room and look it up. Remember, this is before computers and even typewriters were in regular use. All of the log books were hand written, and in interest of speed, it was in cursive in ledgers with tiny lines.
Turns out his name was simply very hard to read. The more common spelling I’d seen basically got an added “u” for his grandfather, due to the handwriting of the immigration official. Nothing nefarious.
My understanding is that there are many (MANY!) family stories about name changes done somewhat arbitrarily by immigration officials, but most research indicates that such changes were extremely rare. Changes sometimes arose because of spelling differences and poor handwriting, but weren’t “deliberate” on the part of the immigration officials.
Unlikely. Most of the employees who dealt with the public at Ellis were bilingual at least. If your relatives spoke a few different languages, they would have easily found someone who spoke one of theirs.
There are a lot of instances like Broomstick’s, in which immigrants didn’t HAVE a true last name when they came to America.
A lot of the most common last names among Italian Americans are merely descritpions of what Italian city or region the original immigrant came from. Hence, there are many Italian-American named Romano, Napolitano or Di Napoli, Venezia, or what have you.
Football player Tony Siragusa’s family came from the Sicilian town that the ancient Greeks called Syracuse.
Quentin Tarantino’s ancestor’s came from Taranto.
Actress Linda Fiorentino’s family came from Florence.
Names like Guy Lombardo, Alyssa Milano, Joseph Bologna, et al., are almost self-explanatory.
Their ancestors probably didn’t have true “last names” unti lthey left Italy.
One interesting last name story in my family is a name that was inexplicably Frenchified around the time of the Civil War. They were farmers in the US midwest, not especially close to Quebec or Louisiana, and as far as we can tell all of them were English speaking. The name got changed back by 1900.
Note that my “No, that’s simply incorrect” was a reply to the OP, not an attempt to deny the validity of your story. What happened in cases like your grandparents’ where there was no surname and nothing surname like, I do not know.
If they arrived around 1900 it should be possible to find out more though, have you tried searching for them in arrival databases to see what’s recorded there?
Immigration officials changed my grandfather’s name recently enough to cause issues. He immigrated from Ukraine to Canada through Quebec City around 1905. Let’s say his name was Tarasenko but was changed to Thomas. My father, who was born here in Montreal, used Thomas all his life. But when it came time for him to apply for his old age pension, government letters arrived to Mister (Dad’s Firstname) Tarasenko. So somebody in the Quebec government recorded the original name, but someone else told my grandfather to use the substitute. (Dad is adamant his father did not choose to change his name.)
It sure sounds legendary to me. That is, the story meets all the criteria of belief narratives passed on in oral tradition. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true, but it does mean that any given case should be treated with extreme skepticism, even if the principals who narrated the story believed it.
We had similar stories in our family that are demonstrably not true.
Immigration is a good period to change a name, and yet changing a name has emotional repercussions. Assigning it to the representative of the new country is externalizes and justifies it.
In the past people weren’t as concerned with how consistently names appeared in the records. Besides, if you think about that story, how exactly would that work? The immigration official tells you in 1915 “Your name is Smith now.” So what? What would have happened if you’d just ignored him? It’s not like you needed your immigration paperwork to get a job or register to vote in those days.
When my great grandparents came here, somebody sure as hell changed their names. Documents from Ukraine show them both with a common Ukranian surname. Common enough, in fact, that they both had the same surname without being related. When they got here, their last name was changed to an equally common, but different, Ukranian surname. The new name is not appreciably more “American sounding” than the old name. In addition, the old man’s first name became Michael, even though the English translation of his name is not Michael.
This is the equival of Nick and Susan Jones moving to another country and becoming Mike and Susan Smith.
They changed their own names, not terribly successfully due to limited experience with English.
The immigration official made a suggestion, which they took.
The immigration official made an order, which they obeyed.
The name was changed upon arrival in America, but after immigration, due to influence / pressure from friends / family / neighbours / employers / newspapers
The name change was done in order to fit in and sound American
The name change was in order to symbolize a new start and make a break with the past
It’s anecdotal, yes, but a friend of mine who has a very generic, bland American name (it’s not Smith, but it’s in the top 10), told me that that name was specifically chosen by the family (or at least the family patriarch) upon immigration to the US in order to fit in. Specifically, the name was the same as a Mafia crime family (this was in the days when the mob had a lot more power than it does now, and wasn’t “cool”) and they didn’t want to have anything to do with that world.
I’m under the impression that these name changes occurred mainly in days past, during the age of mass immigration to the US, i. e. in the 19th and early 20th century. I would assume that today, most immigrants who settle in the United States keep their original names which includes using the correct transliteration (for languages that don’t use Latin script).
It would seem odd to choose a new name that conspicuously does not fit in.
According to some ancient (and thus hardly reliable) fambly lore in my family, that goes back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the family was expelled from Spain and moved to eastern Europe. There, the family patriarch chose the new name of “Foreigner” (in the local language) and forbid the family from ever using the previous name again. To this day, we have no record of what that original name was. But we still have a line of kinfolk with the surname (in the eastern European language) of “Foreigner”.